Let me tell you ahead of time, right now I am sitting in my favorite little coffee shop, drinking a coffee and eating chocolate palms. My life is just as it was 2 months ago, and I am 100% fine and about 98% healthy again.
In late March I joined AFS Spain and a group of about 45 on the Camino de Santiago. We walked 116 km from Tui, the border of Portugal, to Santiago de Compostela. It was absolutely HORRID but at the same time, it was one of the best experiences I've ever had in my life and I would DEFINITELY choose to do it again, if I got the chance.
When you see the email from AFS Spain offering the Camino, you think it's gonna be a slow-paced, nice, stroll through the park and then at the end of the week, you see a huge beautiful church and then you go home. And that's only about half of it. The walking isn't a stroll through a park, it's more like walking at a fast pace, uphill for 5 hours straight, taking an hour break for lunch, and then walking for 7 more hours. On the first day is when everybody's blisters start showing and the second day is when everyone complains about them. Your whole body will ache so badly and your feet will burn and any where you have to walk (when you aren't actually walking the Camino) you will walk to so oddly that it looks like someone stuck a fork up your butt. Not even close to kidding. But while the pain and the constant feeling like you need to lay down in the middle of the trail and sleep (which I feel like is a pretty accurate description of the exchange student life in general) all sucks, you pretty much have the best time ever with 44 other people who are just as miserable as you are. You will walk together, complain together (a lot), laugh together, cry together, hurt together and best of all you will have the best and worst 5 days of your entire life.
I just happened to suffer a tiny bit more than the others. Unfortunately, the day we arrived, I became VERY ill. We had arrived in santiago, and waited for the whole group to catch up. (I would just like to point out that I did not feel sick AT ALL up until this point.) A couple minutes after we left our meeting point to start the last walk to the big church, I started feeling really sick like I needed to puke. A little bit after that started, I became very weak and could barely walk and a couple people had to help carry me/walk with me to the church (shout out to Mariah and Felipe) and as soon as we got to the church (which also happened to be a big center area with thousands of people/tourists/pilgrims there admiring the church and thanking God that they made it 100km or 500km or 1000km) I ran away from our group and puked at least a dozen times. I felt relieved enough to take pictures with people and then became violently ill again. The vomiting continued during the day and I was then taken to stay at the house of a volunteer where I had a fever of 102. I was taken to the doctor, given some medicine but was told not to worry and that it was nothing bad. I ended up sleeping most of the next day and woke up with a fever of over 104.5 but couldn't go to the doctor because I had to leave for my flight to Madrid. As I had no energy at all (could barely sit up in a seat, let alone walk) I was pushed around in a wheelchair (thanks to Kristjana and Juanma) until the plane came (which ended up having a two and half hour delay, so we didn't get on the plane till 1am. After we arrived in Madrid, I was exiting the plane (slowly but surely) and I did something unthinkable (don't laugh I was very sick) I pooped in my pants. I swear I didn't even know that it was happened until after it happened. I then was taken to another volunteers house in Madrid to stay until I was supposed to take the bus the next day back to Tudela. The ride to there house felt like 5 minutes but I was later told that it was actually 45 minutes and I just didn't realize because I wasn't exactly conscious the whole time. The next day it was decided that I wasn't suit to take the bus home and I would be checked into a hospital in Villalba. I ended up in the hospital for a total of five days where I always had tubes running into my arm, food that always went untouched, more blood taken every day for different kinds of tests. My mom was even flown out because AFS agreed that I was very sick and I needed family there. In the end I was diagnosed with a whole crap load of problems such as a urinary tract infection, severe dehydration, anemia, a blood infection, failing liver and kidneys, hepatitis and the biggest problem was that I had the bacteria brucella and the disease brucellosis. Brucellosis is diagnosed in less than 200 people in the United States each year and is very rare. Considering you can really only get it from eating meat or drinking milk from an animal that has brucella, and nobody else near me has the bacteria, nobody really knows how I got it or how I got sick. Brucellosis is a chronic disease that can last for weeks, months or years, that will recurrently make you sick with symptoms that I had while I was sick in the hospital.
NOW, I'm not saying that if you go on the Camino that you will get very sick and almost die like me. Actually, that WONT happen. What happened with me was really weird and the chances that it happens to anyone else is like 0.08% literally.
What I'm saying is that YES you should go on the Camino. YES it was the hardest thing ive ever done and sure I got a little bit sick afterward, but it was the BEST thing I've ever done. It taught me that yeah my feet hurt more than anything has hurt ever, but everyone else hurts too. I'm not the only one. I can't act like I'm the only one who has pain. I can't act like I'm the only one who had problems because everyone is going through the same thing, and other things, sometimes worse, sometimes better, sometimes the same.
I just finished my coffee and I'm thinking about how lucky of a life I have. How many great opportunities I've been given and how I just want everyone around me to have the same chances I do. The cliche "life is short" is so overly used but so appropriate and fits perfectly with how I wish to live my life.
I will be writing another post soon, I promise.
Hasta luego,
Lilly
